We should be skeptical of ideologues who claim to know all of the relevant paths to making ours a better world. how can we be sure that a favorite ideology will in fact bring about good consequences? given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent. 112
Cowen argues that there are multiple worthwhile values in the world, and no single value dominates the others. You might value truth, beauty, pleasure, creativity, companionship, and want to avoid suffering. Those values can coexist, may conflict, and it’s hard to trade off against these different values.
However, there are some values we should be stubbornly attached to: sustainable economic growth, and individual rights. He argues that these two are sort of foundational. They permit the pursuit of other values you might hold, and they protect against the diminishment of those other values.
Because the other values depend in a big way on individual rights and sustainable economic growth, we need to protect those things, and make sure that they grow into the future.
Humans have a tendency to put a lot of value on things in the present, and they “discount” things in the future (eating a ice cream right now is better than eating it in a decade; they would prefer to eat it now).
Cowen thinks this is a mistake, with big practical consequences. If we can give a kid a good life now, it should be just as valuable if we can give a kid a good life in ten years, by making sure there’s prosperity and not too much pollution.
If we make huge mistakes now, it could cost tons of future people opportunities. So we should do good for future people, just like we should do good for current people.
But it seems hard, practically speaking, to know what’s good for people now, and especially for people in the long-distant future. Who knows the right action?
Cowen argues that individual rights and sustainable growth are the surest bets—they haven’t lead us astray in the past, are good in the present, and will offer a good platform for future people to pursue good lives.
I hope I’ve done an adequate job of summarizing some of the book. I’m honestly not sure. After reading the book and re-reading quotes now, it was hard for me to piece it together and see what key arguments he was making. Basically, it seemed like a big argument is: it would be bad to be poor, have no rights, and have lots of pollution. And it would be good to send those things into the future, so people can reap the benefits of compounding. But my summary feels so simplistic and trite that I feel like I missed something.
I enjoyed his musings on uncertainty and self-doubt, in the quotes below.
Idea Density – medium
Related Books – The Life You Can Save, Doing Good Better
Recommend to others: probably start with the related titles above?
Reread personally: no
Quotes
Paraphrase: we need to think about these issues when solving clashes of values: time, aggregation, rules, radical uncertainty, rights, Common Sense morality 19 -23
East Asian economic miracles, which includes japan, South korea, taiwan, Hong kong, singapore, and China ( with a caveat for sustainability in the case of China)… they also represent the highest manifestation of the ethical good in human history to date. 55
It is precisely because we discount for risk that we seek to protect our future against Great tragedies, thereby making that future less risky. if we boost the long-term sustainable growth rate, for instance, we are indeed making the future less risky. rather than ignoring risk, a future oriented perspective takes long-term risk into account and attempts to lower it. 69
Utilitarian prescriptions will have morally counterintuitive implications… namely, utilitarianism May support the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. a talented entrepreneur, for instance, can probably earn a higher rate of return on invested resources than can a disabled great-grandmother. indeed a common complaint in the literature on inequalities that the rich get richer while the poor get poor, or at least more or less stay put. if this portrait is to be believed, then the rich earn higher Returns on their accumulated wealth, as is been argued by the French Economist Thomas picketty. if we combine the trickle down effect from the wealth of the wealthy with a zero rate of discount, it is easy to generate scenarios in which utilitarianism would recommend it redistribution of wealth to the wealthy. 89
Anything we try to do is floating in a sea of long run radical uncertainty, so to speak. only big, important upfront goals will, and reflective equilibrium, stand above the ever-present froth and allow the comparison to be more than a very rough one. putting too many small goals at stake simply means that our moral intuitions will end up confused, which is in fact the correct and intuitive conclusion. if there is any victim of the epistemic critique, it is the focus on small benefits and costs, not consequentialism more generally. if we bundle appropriately and quote think big and quote and pursue Crusonia plants, our moral intuitions will rise above the froth of long run variance. 111
We should be skeptical of ideologues who claim to know all of the relevant paths to making ours a better world. how can we be sure that a favorite ideology will in fact bring about good consequences? given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent. 112
Our specific policy views, though we may rationally believe them to be the best available, will stand only a slight chance of being correct. they ought to stand the highest chance of being correct of all available views, but this chance will not be very high and absolute terms. 112
In other words, writes rarely conflict with consequences in the simple way set out by philosophical thought experiments. we can therefore shift the way we think about radical uncertainty and consequences. rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction. 114
The Digital Sauna 